Director Profile: Francis Fish

Francis Fish

I believe every organisation can produce outstanding results if they are brave enough to take an honest, hard look at what they need to change in order to be better. I believe every team has the capacity to learn how to be a dream team with a little bit of help to find alternative ways to work.

I am a long-time proponent of "small A" agile methods and approaches, which means a pragmatic team- and results-focused approach to improvement drawing on lean thinking rather than mechanically following a recipe that may not be appropriate.

I have been working in Information Technology since 1985 in a number of industries, for several blue chip and consultancy companies including KPMG, Price Waterhouse, GEC, and Oracle Corporation. I am an experienced team leader and mentor, seeing through the full project life cycle from first touch to implementation.

My consultancy company Lean Teams (http://lean-teams.co.uk)  mentors teams from those just getting started with Scrum or XP up to the adoption of a full Kanban system and runs immersive training courses to help with Lean and Agile adoption.

Publications

Conferences

I was the founder of the very successful Manchester Agile Rails Conference in 2011.

In 2012 I ran two startup weekends at DoES Liverpool using the Lean Startup template to enable entrepreneurs to gain a good understanding of the Lean Build/Measure/Learn principles to test their ideas against the potential market before committing themselves to a particular business model.

In 2013 I spoke at Lean Agile Scotland on the subject Lean isn't lean , a polemical talk about the mis-use of the lean standard work concept.

At Agile Cambridge 2013,  my talk was It's not your fault on why targets don't work. This talk is available on Infoq http://www.infoq.com/presentations/targets-systems-thinking .

All of the video content can be found on my company website http://lean-teams.co.uk/presentations.

Core competencies

People skills

Industries

Technical capabilities

Understanding business needs

Problem Solving and Analysis

Project Estimating and Management

Performance Management

Recruiting

Giving training and mentoring

Good Communicator

Team Leader

Qualified level 3 kayak coach

Online travel agent

Online gaming back end services

Legal claims management

Financial Services

Linear Asset Management

Pharmaceuticals

Publishing

Marketing

Health care

Telecommunications

Discrete Manufacturing

Internet Banking

Technical Pre-Sales

Lean

Kanban

Scrum

Behaviour-driven development

Test-driven development

Agile methods

Kanban

Web development and Architecture

Database Design

Mobile app development

 

Recent Employment History

Note: the roles at the beginning of this table overlap because they represent complimentary work streams and consultancy products.

February 2012 - Now

Lean Teams

Principal

Owner of independent consultancy and training company.

  • Create and provide training in BDD for major online job site

  • Create programme of training in test-driven development

  • Devise and run immersive training in lean and agile methodologies

  • Write books and blog posts on lean and agile methodologies

  • Run startup weekends

  • Structured intervention on client sites introducing lean thinking

February 2012 - Now

Pharmarketeer

Director

Web development

  • Design and build web-based scraper creation tools, including back end provisioning and control. Distributed architecture and provisioning as well as front end work.

  • Mobile app in iOS and Android for consumer electronics controlled using wireless casts to RF controller. Worked out how to get it working in Android and iOS.

  • Mobile web directory listing for schools services.

  • Designed, built and commissioned a site for UCLAN Dentistry department where students can enter their clinic scores.

February 2012 - Now

Cuprium CIC

Technical Director

  • Part-time role building and designing the open source offering for credit unions.

November 2011 - Feb 2012

Incutio

Development Leader

  • Introducing agile processes and methods, particularly Behaviour Driven Development, to a team of developers.

  • Liaison with clients over scope and costs of development work

  • Scoping and planning of work to turn key products into SaaS offerings, including re-architecture to Rails 3

  • Reworking projects into Rails 3 for deployment in new data centre using Chef

February 2010 - November 2011

Online Travel Agency Manchester

Agile XP Coach

Mentoring and working with developers from our  Ruby Academy  with Scrum and Agile. Using RSpec and Cucumber plus helping them understand the Rails and Active Record idioms needed to be productive. Pair programming to learn and pass on expertise.

Working closely with the business to create user stories and estimate the work.

The projects are listed below:

  • Building a centralised hotel database for the online website

  • Implemented data warehouse for the Deal Finder application, designed the search cache

  • Designing and implementing a Deal Finder API for partners

  • Working with the Finance department on enhancements to help cash flow

  • Helping to implement the underlying CMS that drives the main website

  • Working with the other senior developers deriving strategy and architecture

  • Reviewing and creating materials on the latest techniques and Agile practices, e.g. giving a talk on YAGNI at Agile North 2011, public blog posts on peer code review checklists and Rails 3

August 2009 - February 2010

Gala Coral Plc Woking

System review and TDD training and implementation

  • Introducing Agile way of working to the ePlatform team. Conducted initial review of the code base and generated reports and outline code review documents for use by the team and presented the results to them. Worked closely with the overall management in the setting of goals.

  • Designed and implemented an infrastructure to support a PHP-based Test-Driven Development methodology and trained the team in its use.

  • Helped with technical interviewing for new team members and contractors.

  • Created a continuous integration server using PHP Under Control (based on the Java-based Cruise Control) and wrote appropriate build scripts.

  • Worked with other teams introducing TDD concepts and also wrote some code interfacing with external web services.

  • Mentored team members in database coding and design issues, as well as basic class and layer architecture.

Education

1983 - 1986 Liverpool Polytechnic

  • B Sc. (Hon) Applied Statistics and Computing

Design downloaded from free website templates. Content created using Jekyll and some extra coding on the side
Pharmarketeer is incorporated and registered in England and Wales with company number 06940361, whose registered office is at 64 Westbank Road, Birkenhead, Merseyside, CH42 7JP